Here is another spriting article maybe you think there is to many spriting articles... ...well I DON'T! Anyway in this article I will explain how I learned to draw FF/Zelda style chars. lets get started!
First to make all the spriting much more simple we need a spritebase. A spritebase is B/W, sexless char. *important* make shure that the char. is as neutral as possible cause it is very hard to draw a female char of a male looking char.
Here is a spritebase that could have been used for FF6
IMPORTANT! I did NOT draw that base and the coloured line to the left displays the propotions of the hair and stuff
Ok so now we have a spritebase then we just colorise it and then it's finnished! ...NO we need to redraw it so that no-one could imagine that we have used a spritebase.
...let's decide that we want to draw a viking char. then we would start drawing bigger looking arms. to make a char look much stronger we could add one pixel on top of them and make them look more square. next we can add the beard and I dont really have any tip. for making a good looking beard so I would just have to say KEEP ON TRYING! then we add the rest like a helmet.
Ok so now we have a B/W outline of our char... Lets move on to coloring. First of all you have to remember that this char. will be pretty small so you need to carefully choose wich colors to use.
Bad decition: dark blue shirt and dark blue-green pants.
Good decition: Drak green pants and red shirt.
ok so now you have a good colored char. then you should shade it. IMPORTANT! because this is a small char use shades with a very dark shade of the normal color cause else it woudn't look like you have shaded it
(*)FINNISHED!(*)
One last word... if this didn't turn out well just get a FF6 char. resize your char. and the FF6 char. 8x and compare them, study them hard! and you will learn how to draw one I promise I couldn't even draw a circle beforwe I tried this teqnuice... well almostX)
I used this very much in an old zelda game I once tried. I got Link's character and editted him, turning him into a neutral template. I also got Zelda's character and turned her into a female template. Almost every humanoid character was based originally from one of those character bases. Gave some very good effects. It helps keep your sprites looking similar enough to tell they're form the same game, without making them all identical.
Despite what everyone else thinks, I have to say that the title gives false advertisement. It has nothing to do with actual drawing (only sprting,and still one at that) and it had nothing to do with doing anything "well".
oh yea? if you just look at my avatar and tell me that its crap I could consider switching well to bad... cause that is drewn by using the same metods that I have explained here ...but you're right this is a spritearticle so i should change the name... happy?